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There were once 40 of them, identical rectangles of Aquia Creek sandstone, one foot wide and four feet long, the lower half rough and unfinished, the upper half smooth, like a blank piece of paper awaiting a calligrapher's pen.

They were inserted into the earth more than 200 years ago, placed along the 40-mile perimeter that once framed the diamond-shaped District of Columbia.

And that is where the stones have pretty much stayed, even after Virginia took back its part of the District. The markers are obsolete in the age of Global Positioning System devices but exert a certain power over a few people.

People such as Stephen Powers, who got up early one recent rainy Sunday to visit every single boundary stone.

"This should take us somewhere [around] seven hours," Stephen said as he steered his Honda minivan down a wet Arlington County street. "The quickest I've ever done it is six hours, 34 minutes; the longest is seven hours and 45 minutes."

Stephen, 45, is a civil engineer and lives in Arlington. His infatuation with the stones started when his daughter Vanessa was in second grade. She had to provide a "fun fact" about Arlington for school. Stephen gave her one: Arlington used to be part of Washington. To prove it, he took her to a park not far from their house, where the worn nub of a stone sat inside a black metal fence. That stone, he told Vanessa, once marked the western boundary of a new country's new capital.

That was the first stone Stephen drove to on the recent outing, joined on his fourth annual pilgrimage by his brother Michael, his cousin Jim Gilmartin, friend Mike Chapman and me.

Stephen had planned the day with an engineer's precision. His aim was to hurry to each stone, jump out of the van, briefly inspect the stone's condition, take a photo, then drive to the next one.

"They actually did the survey in about 34 days, I believe," Stephen said. The "they" who mapped out the border were Andrew Ellicott and his brother Joseph. The first stone, the south cornerstone, was laid at Jones Point in Alexandria with help from Benjamin Banneker, a free black man who was an astronomer and mathematician.

Then the Ellicotts and their team moved clockwise around the perimeter. The time-consuming part came next: placing the stones and cutting a 40-foot swath along the border -- 20 feet wide on each side. That took almost two years.

"It was basically a logging party," Stephen said. Also on the crew was a stonemason, there to engrave each stone when it was in place, marking one face with the year the stone was laid -- 1791 or 1792 -- one with the magnetic north compass reading of the location, another with either "Maryland" or "Virginia," and the opposite face hinting at the purpose of the expedition: "Jurisdiction of the United States."